The Regime Under the Microscope (continued...)

Part 2.2: Into the Neoliberal Weeds

A bit of cultural theory

In my previous post, I reviewed the broad strokes of neoliberal history.  In this post, we get deeper into the neoliberal weeds, considering the basic tenets as well as some of the most destructive practices of this economic formation.  And while I know discussing economic theory is never a light-and-breezy affair, I ask, nonetheless, that you keep the bigger picture in mind.  Namely, that the better informed the citizen, the better off the democracy.

Anthropologist and social critic David Harvey describes the essential precepts of neoliberalism thus:

Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.  The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices.  (2)

Furthermore, neoliberalism “holds that the social good will be maximized by maximizing the reach and frequency of market transactions, and it seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market” (3).  If markets don’t exist in certain sectors—e.g. social security, health care, education, environmental pollution—then they should be created, by the state if necessary.  Much beyond the preservation and creation of markets, however, the state must not go.  Neoliberal theory claims that the state is incapable of reading markets effectively or intervening in them without bias (2).  Only the private sector can deal properly with markets.

Another key element Harvey stresses about neoliberalism is its predilection and dependence on what he terms a “time-space compression.”  Neoliberal economics thrive on a global range and short-term market contracts—the shorter the better (3-4).  Increasingly, then, information technologies, instantaneous trading, and Big Data all have enabled a world-wide economy operating at the speed of light and favoring those with the most computational power.

Finally, Harvey stresses how the founding neoliberal thinkers claimed that the best way to guarantee human dignity and promote individual freedom was by way of the freedom of the market and of trade.  State intervention of any kind destroyed these wonderful-sounding political ideals (5-7).

In sum, neoliberalism promotes a simple and absolute binary opposition: good market/bad state.

Applying this bit of cultural theory

Freedom, of course, is a beguiling call-to-action for any number of political philosophies and movements.  Once a political-economic theory is put into operation, however, a different reality often emerges.  Such is the case with neoliberalism.  Harvey demonstrates how the apparatus of a functioning neoliberal state is one that reflects only “the interests of private property owners, businesses, multinational corporations, and financial capital” (7).

When set in motion, a worldview of Market über alles favors money and property over democracy and people.

At the core of his study of neoliberalism, historian Quinn Slobodian summarizes the basic consensus shared by neoliberal intellectuals.  The common thread among them is the protection of global profit-making versus the citizenry of democratic states.  The “rule of property” must be protected against the “rule of states.”  Because of “its legitimation of demands for redistribution” of wealth, Democracy presents an existential threat to capital and property.  To meet this threat, a neoliberal world economic order has been put in place that “exercises discipline on individual nations” by various punitive means (270-272).

Paradoxically, then, the individual freedoms of laissez-faire economics are to be imposed by a decidedly unfree, undemocratic system of global economic regulation—one aimed primarily, moreover, at curbing the emerging postcolonial democratic states of the Global South.  According to Slobodian, a market economy is like a dictatorship: the single-minded objectives of one group trample the self-determination, human rights, and social justice of everyone else (see also Iber 52-53).

About this neoliberal project, Harvey proposes for us a choice.  Either we can see it “as a utopian project” to reorganize international capitalism, or we can see it as “a political project” to restore money and power to economic elites.  Harvey opts for the latter: “Neoliberalization has not been very effective in revitalizing global capital accumulation, but it has succeeded remarkably well in restoring, or in some instances (as in Russia and China) creating, the power of an economic elite” (19).

Neoliberal happy talk about individual freedom, then, is but a mask to justify and legitimate the channeling of insane amounts of wealth upward into the hands of the privileged few.

For example, in 2018, eight men held as much wealth as the poorest half of the planet—3.6 billion people (Iber 51).

For example, a Credit Suisse report found that while at the height of the financial crisis of 2008 the world’s richest people held 42.5% of the world’s total wealth, by 2017 that share had jumped to 50.1%.  Meanwhile, at the base of this “global wealth pyramid,” 70% of the world’s working-age population held just 2.7% of global wealth (Neate).

Mind you, this was before the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. 

In early 2023, economic research carried out by Oxfam International details how billionaires have enjoyed a stunning increase in their wealth as a result of the pandemic.  Somehow, it seems, the superrich didn’t get the global memo about us all being in this together.

During the pandemic and cost-of-living crisis years since 2020, $26 trillion (63 percent) of all new wealth was captured by the richest 1 percent, while $16 trillion (37 percent) went to the rest of the world put together. A billionaire gained roughly $1.7 million for every $1 of new global wealth earned by a person in the bottom 90 percent. Billionaire fortunes have increased by $2.7 billion a day.

Holy Shit.  These numbers are like trying to wrap your head around the infinity of the universe.

In particular, Oxfam reports how billionaire wealth surged during COVID by way of rapidly rising food and energy prices.  Some 95 food and energy corporations more than doubled their earnings in 2022, raking in $306 billion in windfall profits and paying out $257 billion (84 percent) of that to rich shareholders.  These Excess corporate profits have driven at least half of inflation in Australia, the U.S. and the U.K. 

So don’t blame Biden for inflation.  Look instead to corporate greed.

As for all the folks on the short end of this neoliberal stick, Oxfam documents how “at least 1.7 billion workers now live in countries where inflation is outpacing wages, and over 820 million people—roughly one in ten people on Earth—are going hungry.”  The World Bank finds that we are likely seeing the biggest increase in global inequality and poverty since World War 2.

If you have the heart, take a look at the World Poverty Clock.  Decidedly not a light-and-breezy affair.

Along with commercial profiteering, Oxfam points out how the other main drivers of this astounding level of inequality are decades of tax-dodging by and tax cuts for rich individuals and multinational corporations.  In many countries, the poorest people pay higher tax rates than billionaires.

But surely none of these disturbing neoliberal trends apply to the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.  Right?  All of this discouraging economic news is just your typical third-world fiasco.  Yeah?

In 2018—before the pandemic—the United Nations Human Rights Council issued a special report on extreme poverty and human rights in the United States.  The author of the report, Philip Alston, characterizes America as “a land of stark contrasts.”  In his Overview, he tells of the United States currently:

About 40 million live in poverty, 18.5 million in extreme poverty, and 5.3 million live in Third World conditions of absolute poverty.  It has the highest youth poverty rate in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the highest infant mortality rates among comparable OECD States.  Its citizens live shorter and sicker lives compared to those living in all other rich democracies, eradicable tropical diseases are increasingly prevalent, and it has the world’s highest incarceration rate, one of the lowest levels of voter registrations among OECD countries and the highest obesity levels in the developed world (3-4).

Among the many problems discussed in the report, Alston cites the plight of the embattled and shrinking middle class in America as well as the damaging consequences to democracy of extreme wealth inequality (19).

Do you really wonder where the hell Trump came from?

Since 1980, when Reagan was elected president, a conspicuous cause of the widening wealth gap in America has been the Republican mania for implementing tax cuts for the rich.  These cuts are predicated on the “trickle-down” mythology that such policy stimulates job growth, thereby benefiting everyone.  History shows us that these ideas, pushed by Reagan and his neoliberal advisors, simply don’t work (see Chang, Thing 13).

The Reagan tax cuts (the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981) and the subsequent Bush 2 tax cuts (the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001) put more money into the hands of the wealthiest Americans, but they also added substantially to the national deficit by way of decreased revenues.  In theory, the boost in job and economic growth that these cuts were supposed to stimulate would offset that deficit increase.  However, such a boost never materialized.  The deficit rose sharply as a result of both tax cuts.

Despite these failures, Trump and the Republican Congress enacted another so-called “supply-side” tax cut for the rich and for corporations, this one optimistically—and cynically—named the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.  Early expert projections for this tax bill predicted it performing little differently than its forerunners.  And—surprise, surprise—the Trump tax cuts have been a flop, too.

Testifying before the Senate Committee on the Budget in May 2023, Samantha Jacoby, a Senior Tax Legal Analyst for the nonpartisan research and policy institute, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, painted an unflattering picture of neoliberal tax policy in general and the Trump tax cuts in particular.  The title of her statement sums it up nicely: “After Decades of Costly, Regressive, and Ineffective Tax Cuts, a New Course Is Needed.”  In her report, she makes three main points.

Point #1: The upshot of these decades of Republican tax policy has been to give windfall tax advantages to the top 1% of rich Americans as well as to large corporations, thereby exacerbating income and wealth inequality.  States Jacoby: “These tax cuts cost significant federal revenue, adding to the federal debt and limiting our ability to invest in policies that broaden opportunity and contribute to shared prosperity.”

Point #2: Extending the Trump tax cuts (currently set to expire at the end of 2025) would serve only to prolong this government handout to the already well-off.  Moreover, because these tax cuts go unpaid for, they will continue to increase the federal debt and burden the long-term fiscal health of the U.S.  As one measure of the unfairness codified into law by the Trump tax cuts, Jacoby calculates that, “Permanently extending the cuts would benefit households in the top 1 percent more than twice as much as those in the bottom 60 percent as a share of their incomes.”

Point #3: Simply put, policymakers need to stop pursuing this neoliberal trickle-down nonsense.  Flawed corporate tax policies need reversing; international tax provisions need strengthening; big tax breaks to high-income and high-wealth households need changing.  Such steps will make for a more progressive tax code as well as raise substantial revenues that can be used to address the many difficult issues facing our country.  Points out Jacoby: “This approach stands in stark contrast to the House Republican debt limit bill, which would force deep cuts in a host of national priorities; leave more people hungry, homeless, and without health coverage; and make it easier for wealthy people to cheat on their taxes.”

But, of course, Republicans remain hellbent on tax cuts for the rich.

Keep in mind that the only policy “achievement” of Trump’s presidency was to pass his tax cut.  And rest assured that passing more tax cuts for the wealthy is Trump’s top priority for a second term.  That’s why billionaires support such an obviously blighted individual as Trump.

Billionaires don’t give two shakes about the MAGA gibberish Trump spews or his grandiose authoritarian visions of himself or even his unmistakable scramble to keep himself out of jail.  All of that is just so much campaign sound-and-fury designed to amaze and bamboozle the natives—and sadly it works quite well on about 40% of us.

All the billionaires really care about is making themselves ever more rich.  And, to achieve that end, they’re happy to run any tractable jackass they can find for elected office—local, state, or federal.

Writing in 2005, Harvey describes how the phenomenal concentration of money and power that “now exist in the upper echelons of capitalism have not been seen since the 1920s.”  He comments: “It has been part of the genius of neoliberal theory to provide a benevolent mask full of wonderful-sounding words like freedom, liberty, choice, and rights, to hide the grim realities of the restoration or reconstitution of naked class power” (119).  Now, in 2024, neoliberalism as a system, undergirded by these bogus and deceptive catchphrases, is in high gear around the globe.

In fact, in his study of the phenomenon of debt, Richard Dienst finds that under the regime of neoliberalism the concept of being poor has experienced a fundamental shift in meaning.  Whereas once it meant sheer scarcity external to social organization, poverty “is now permanently installed in the global functioning of the system, as the price a certain portion of the population must pay for the enrichment of the rest” (35).

Neoliberal thinkers explain away poverty in a number of ways, from seeing it as a disease or deficiency that only the market can cure (as opposed to the market being its cause), to seeing poverty as nothing more than a part of “nature” (as in the oft-spoken platitude “there are always going to be poor people”), to seeing it as the result of “bad government,” or to simply not seeing any kind of equitable distribution of prosperity as a worthwhile social goal (Dienst 33-39).

What this all spells out for the world, needless to say, is what we are already seeing: acute global antagonism between haves and have-nots.

The yoke of neoliberalism forces people to fight for shrinking assets of all kinds.  In this struggle—also needless to say—the wealthy and the powerful will not relinquish their advantage of wealth and power voluntarily.

As Dienst characterizes this class fracture, the poor are seen in terms of how little they can consume in order to survive, while the rich are seen in terms of how much they can splendidly accumulate.  Moreover, “Between these extremes there can be no equal exchange and no common ground, but only the confrontation between the command structures of credit on one side and the webs of indebtedness on the other” (49).

Are we already engaged, then, in the Battle Royale of class conflict?

So what?

This lopsided war of rich-versus-poor was grimly apparent during the coronavirus pandemic.  Trump and the Republicans blithely ignored scientific reality (e.g. drink bleach) as they cajoled and coerced workers to risk death by returning to unsafe working environments.  A big part of this debacle involved corporations being handed taxpayer “bailouts” and granted immunity from lawsuits so they could rake in record profits.

Meanwhile, millions of Americans were put out of work and then had to fight their way through byzantine bureaucracy in an effort to get inadequate unemployment benefits.  All while rightwing media outlets riled up gun thugs to demand “liberation” in front of Statehouses and encouraged anti-mask and anti-vax morons to lynch Anthony Fauci.

In short, behold the neoliberal dystopia—a slow-moving, economically caused apocalypse.

How has this catastrophe, decades-long in the making, been taking place?  What neoliberal mechanisms, exactly, have been put into play?  In my next three posts, I explore three spheres of concerted neoliberal activity: corporations and the workplace; financial markets; ideology.

Works Cited and Consulted

Alston, Philip.  “Report of the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights on his mission to the United States of America.”  United Nations Human Rights Council, 4 May 2018.

Chang, Ha-Joon.  23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism.  Penguin, 2011.

Dienst, Richard.  The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing Against the Common Good.  Verso, 2011.

Harvey, David.  A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford UP, 2005.

Iber, Patrick.  “Worlds Apart: How Neoliberalism Shapes the Global Economy and Limits the Power of Democracies.”  The New Republic, May 2018, pp. 51-54.

Jacoby, Samantha.  “After Decades of Costly, Regressive, and Ineffective Tax Cuts, a New Course Is Needed.”  Testimony before the Senate Committee on the Budget, 17 May 2023.

Neate, Rupert.  “Richest 1% Own Half the World’s Wealth, Study Finds.”  The Guardian, 14 Nov. 2017.

Oxfam International.  “Richest 1% bag nearly twice as much wealth as the rest of the world put together over the past two years.”  16 January 2023.

Slobodian, Quinn.  Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism.  Harvard UP, 2018.

COMING IN TWO WEEKS: tales of terror from the neoliberal corporate workplace...

AND DON’T FORGET...

Read some provocative fiction.  Check out and subscribe to my other Substack newsletter, 2084 Quartet at:

While you’re at it, read some provocative social commentary.  Check out and subscribe to this absolute Substack gem as well: